Carl-Richard

@KoryKat The irony of me asking about an original thought you've had but you're spamming lines upon lines of ChatGPT answers.

If you experience coming up with an idea that you haven't heard about before, even if that idea might've been described already, for our estimation purposes, that idea counts as original. But of course, in reality, it's unlikely that you've discovered something completely original. However, if you're dealing with very niche topics, it might actually not be described anywhere, or at least only a very few people might know about it. Even better, you can apply that idea in a niche context, and then it becomes exceedingly likely that you're being original. But again, that is besides the point here.

Let's go down a level: what 13 Meta-systematic concepts have you discovered?

Oh really? What new paradigms have you created recently?

I do think I have original meta-systematic thoughts at times where I discover connections between different systems, but I'm not necessarily able to to describe the connections with a single term. For example, a few moments ago I was reading about the Cambrian explosion and started to see similarities to the advent of Stage Red (let's call it the "Faustian explosion"). You can draw comparisons in multiple domains, for example the environmental, developmental and ecological domain: In the environmental domain, the Cambrian explosion coincided with an increased level of oxygen in the oceans, allowing organisms to grow more rapidly and expend more energy. The Faustian explosion coincided with an increased food availability due to the advent of agriculture, freeing up more time and labor and expending more energy elsewhere. The unifying theme is increased metabolism, energy output, work output and growth. In the developmental domain, the Cambrian explosion saw the transition from mostly unicellular life to more multicellular life. Bodily structures complexified, particularly leading to the rise of metazoans (animals). The Faustian explosion saw the transition from tribes ("single cells") to empires ("multi-cells"); multiple tribes subsumed into a larger tribe. Social structures complexified, particularly into dominator hierarchies. The unifying theme is upscaling and complexification of biological or social bodies. In the ecological domain, the Cambrian explosion coincided with increased predation due to increasing sizes of animals, enhanced predation strategies (e.g. shell crushing), and the advent of apex predators (no natural predators of their own). The Faustian explosion coincided with increased tribal warfare due to increasing sizes of tribes, enhanced tribal warfare strategies (e.g. metal weapons), and the advent of empires ("apex predator tribe" with no natural predators, greatly simplified). The unifying themes are increased predation, enhanced strategies and power monopolies. As for finding a general term that connects the different systems: what would be a term which describes an explosion of "increased metabolism, energy output, work output and growth; upscaling and complexification of biological or social bodies; and increased predation, enhanced strategies and power monopolies"? "Monsterification"? "Hulkification"? Maybe you need to look at more examples of related systems before finding a good term. Another time, I drew a connection between gated ion channels in cell membranes and electrical circuits: opening the ion channel allows for the flow of ions (charged particles), just like opening a switch in an electrical circuit allows for the flow of electrons (charged particles). Here, the obvious common term is simply "circuit" (electrochemical vs. electrical).

This isn't about SD, but cognitive complexity ☺️ Cognitive complexity is basically what distinguishes the people who make the theories from the people who teach them (or simply use them). If you have 160 IQ but you're mostly at 11-12 Formal-Systematic, you can be at top 1% of most published researchers and slowly inch the paradigm forward, but not a revolutionary scientist who shatters the paradigm. What is striking about this distinction between cognitive complexity and symbolic code is that you realize geniuses of history like Plato and Aristotle were extremely cognitively complex (14-15 paradigmatic–cross-paradigmatic), but because of their time, they had to work with what they had (essentially nothing) to create new systems of thought almost completely from scratch. And today, these systems of thought make up the very foundations of our society which us simpleminded people can install and "shoulder-stand" on. And today, we have people like Ken Wilber doing the same thing, providing free code for us to download. But just because you downloaded the code and speak the language, don't make the mistake of thinking you could've created the code all by yourself (or maybe he just read a lot, who knows 😝)

I want to show this to my TERF-ish stepmom. She would probably laugh her ass off.

True, but if you're a young male and say 15 years old like I was when starting out with basically zero knowledge about lifting and only a workout program that I got from an introductory PT lesson, it's in your primal instincts to smash that weight to pieces. Your surging testosterone levels and ape level brain simply won't allow anything else. In such cases, it takes a lot of "brainwashing" with getting spammed with dozens of YouTube shorts each day of Mike Isratael hammering in his tightened anus approach to lifting before you transcend those impulses. I had a friend who when he tried deadlifts for the first time, he instantly put on 100kg without warming up and fucked his back. Luckily it wasn't too serious.

Hehe. I wonder how many murder charges would be filed if it was possible to throw a hammer through the screen at the other person while experiencing classic gamer rage 😆 Especially seing how people answer questions about taking a relatively marginal sum of money for killing a random person in the world (and that's a conscious decision, not an impulsive one).

Lol. I think this is might be beyond simple "gamer rage". Considering that ArcheAge is an MMORPG, and considering that people often invest huge parts of their life playing such games, it's likely that he was severely hurt by the guy in-game, likely lost hundreds of hours of work, and somewhat understandably developed a deep hatred for the guy. So it would probably better be called "gamer hatred" 😆 Or maybe he is just a psycho and the guy just called him a "noob" in-game and that was the last straw.

Alex O'Connor is probably the most based atheist in existence 😂

You will be experiencing taking actions regardless of whether free will or determinism is true. Nothing changes there.

Welcome to Green. It will get better. You're also young. As for choosing a path, you just have to try something. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Nothing will be absolutely perfect. As for finding out what to believe, it's the same answer. As you try out things in life, you'll find out more about what you want, which in a big way informs what you believe.

Hanzi Freinacht was right. Studying the Model of Hierarchical Complexity does make you disillusioned about people. Do you have any arguments for your position?

Guitar if I remember correctly. It could've also been bass or drums.

I have always been attracted to the pragmatic way of describing knowledge: as useful fictions. In other words, things aren't so much true as they are useful for fulfilling some goal, e.g. describing, predicting or making sense of something in the world. However, the common and valid objection to this is that in order to establish that something is useful, you have to establish that something is the case, i.e. true. And I understand the point of that objection, and that fundamentally, a certain kind of realism is unavoidable when trying to speak about anything. However, I still prefer the pragmatic way of speaking, namely for this reason: it keeps you perpetually grounded and aware of your fundamental assumptions. Any time you claim "this is true" without clarifying with "granted that we're speaking about constructions, concepts, models, etc., for the sake of making sense of the world, etc.", you become more prone to slipping into naive realism, i.e. taking your constructions for something more than just constructions. This is a terrifying prospect and something I intuitively want to avoid, and clinging to the pragmatist language game provides me with a sense of safety against this. So it's not that I think the pragmatist view is ultimately "more true" than the realist one. It's ironically that I think it's more useful. I think it's safer and wiser. And at the end of the day, it's simply a different language game, a different tool, and you should use the tools which you think are the best for you. It doesn't really change anything at the bottom of things, only how you interact with the world. And when you constantly interact with the world while using deep and heavy abstractions, keeping the fact that they're abstractions perpetually above board is a very sobering and responisible thing to do. I might also prefer this because I'm more feminine in this respect, in that I don't want to be too quick to judge or conclude something as a clear-cut case, or that I prefer to minimize risk, or that I prefer to express things fully with all their flaws even though it takes more work or looks less elegant. And someone else might simply prefer the opposite and are more masculine in this respect. "This is true and this is not" is more elegant and assertive than "this is useful for this end", but it's also more dangerous and can lead to self-deception if you're not otherwise diligent with how you use your language.

@Rigel I performed that song in high school together with my music class as a band

This is not a book or an article but a really interesting talk about the possible mechanics of (conscious) reincarnation ("choosing" your next life). Essentially, he draws parallels to lucid dreaming.

I've recently become obsessed about observing how leaves change throughout the seasons, especially when they're at their peak before showing signs of decomposing. "When is it going to happen?" And virgin leaves. And of course, autumn leaves.

A couple of years ago, I found out Spiral Dynamics has a problem: sampling bias. Specifically, Clare Graves' essay samples consisted of only North Americans (primarily white, affluent college kids), and Don Beck's "samples" (I can't find anything on the methods he used) consisted of only North Americans and South Africans. Generally, the sample is biased towards Western cultures (and more importantly, it completely lacks Eastern cultures). When I first learned about this, I thought maybe it's not a big problem, because dozens of other models (although with similar sampling bias) have come to similar conclusions (Piaget, Holberg, Loevinger, etc.). However, these models generally do not include the equivalent of Turquoise. And this is exactly what turns out to be the problem: Turquoise itself seems to be the result of sampling bias. When Western people reach Green-Yellow, they get statistically more familiar with New Age ideas, particularly Eastern-inspired non-dual mysticism. This is because the West significantly repressed its mysticism for the last millennia, so you generally need to import it from other cultures to discover it (which obviously happens more often at Green-Yellow). You would expect these people to describe it as their highest value, which according to Graves' methodology would be their highest stage, in this case Turquoise. However, non-dual mysticism has of course existed all throughout history and at all stages of development. This is self-evident as you're importing these ideas from ancient religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Now, if the creators of SD had used samples from the cultures you're importing the ideas from, mainly Eastern cultures, then they could've easily ruled out mysticism as being its own stage, because again, it's essentially present at all stages in these cultures and not just at later stages. Had they done that, Turquoise would clearly be seen as an artefact of sampling bias. You can make the same case from a theoretical perspective, without relying on empirical data. For example, Hanzi Freinacht in The Listening Society, has pointed out that Turquoise fails to provide any critique towards Yellow (which I agree with). More specifically, it doesn't provide a higher level that "transcends and includes" the previous stage. It doesn't address any of the problems of the previous stage. It only sidesteps them, as I've pointed out, through mysticism. And maybe not coincidentally, Hanzi refers to Turquoise as New-Agey "holistic" or "integral" people. So to summarize, "Turquoise" is essentially what you get when you build SD based on data from Western educated youth and not much else. Its purported contributions to Yellow is not substantially different from New Age mysticism, and it does not critique or solve any of the problems of the previous stage.

@Nilsi You seem to be talking about a more practical everyday concept of pragmatism. I'm specifically talking about epistemological pragmatism: the idea that "truth" is better stated as "utility". Epistemological pragmatism is more linguistically messy than epistemological realism, because it's obsessed with stating the context and conditions for truth claims; "this is true in so far it's useful for this aim". Meanwhile, realism focuses on the truth claims themselves; "it's true though". Of course, realism can still be context aware, but it's not baked into the language. The concept of utility always signifies "utility for what or whom"? So it's always somewhat context aware. On the other hand, the concept of truth, fundamentally, is true by virtue of what it is, irrespective of any external condition. So realism need not be context aware. Now, what pragmatism gains by being more informative (context awareness), it loses by being less elegant (stating the truth plainly). In this way, it's more feminine; it's less concerned about reducing things down and rather stating things in their full complexity, even if it's more chaotic and messy; being open and allowing vs. judging and deciding. All in all, in their mature (not naive) forms, I see pragmatism and realism as simply different ways of speaking about the same issue, with different pros and cons. And I simply prefer the baked-in context awareness over the elegance.

@Leo Gura Is it true that you only read the title before commenting? 🥲

I train with a plan but still try to go intense. I did try the slow and controlled approach for about a year when I was trying to fix my muscle imbalances, but now in the last few weeks when I tried the usual intense training, it's night and day in terms of how it feels (mood, energy, pump, etc.). It's also night and day for your cognitive functioning (for example, lactate is directly involved in glutamate transmission). If it's one thing a newcomer does not naturally gravitate towards, it's slow, controlled, deep stretch, pause at bottom.

Probably. This is just testing Wilber's Waking Up vs. Growing Up hypothesis. You should expect to find people with mystical ideas and states that do not understand Orange, Green, Yellow, etc., which means that mysticism by itself cannot be the highest level of human development. Now, you can argue like Wilber that once you max out Growing up then Waking up would be a "step up", which to my knowledge is what he describes with Tier 3. But of course, that is different than claiming whatever has been claimed about Turquoise; that it's somehow distinct from Yellow and somehow not mystical (or is it?). I'm planning to read a bit more about Wilber's Tier 3 idea. Now, while I don't think Turquoise currently exist, I do think it will probably exist in the future, but what that looks like, we don't know.

Loads of steroids and coffee 😤 It's not that they don't listen to their bodies. It's that they listen to their mind first and body second. The way they structure their training penalizes intensity and flow, which is what makes training feel good and how you perform the best. They make training feel like you hate yourself. Back in the day, bad form meant "not full range of motion". Today, thanks to Dr. Mike and Mr. Nipples, bad form means anything else than slowly controlling the excentric, ridiculously deep stretch and pausing at the bottom. You can train intensely with full range of motion (good form), no problem. Not at all. Training hardcore is what feels good. It is what comes naturally before your nerd brain takes over and overanalyzes everything. And really, fearing being judged as an "ego lifter" is the real ego lifting.